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You seen the toothpaste? she asked.

Harlan shrugged. Maybe we left it in the last motel.

That’d be the third tube this trip.

Harlan didn’t understand how Lisa could get so worked up about a tube of toothpaste. It was astonishing how she could be so philosophical when they hit a deer in some prairie backwater and were stuck there for three nights waiting for the body shop to fix the van. But lose a tube of toothpaste and the world might end. Probably it had to do with control. A tube of toothpaste is something we can control. A deer leaping onto the road is more like an act of God. Even Lisa could see that Harlan didn’t have time to brake, so after the initial shock, she got out of the car and, staring at the bloody carcass and the mashed-in grill, said: C’est la vie. But the first time Harlan forgot to pack the toothpaste, she made it sound like a sign of the coming apocalypse.

You seen the vacuum bags?

What for?

I wanna do some gardening.

Don’t be an ass.

Why do you think I’m asking for the vacuum bags?

What I meant was: I put in a fresh bag when we left on the trip.

Well it’s full.

You mean the kids actually used the thing while we were gone?

Looks like.

Should be a box of them. Linen closet. Top shelf.

Harlan found the box, but it was empty. That was so like the kids, especially the twins: use something up then put back the empty box without telling anybody it needs replacing. They did this all the time with the breakfast cereal and the Kleenex, and the milk. The milk was the worst. At least once a week, Harlan poured himself a bowl of cereal only to find that one of the kids had put an empty carton of milk back in the fridge. Harlan returned to the garage and tossed the empty box of vacuum bags into the recycling bin.

Harlan didn’t feel like driving to the store. He’d had enough of driving these past weeks. Instead, he drew a stool to the garbage can, put on the mask he used for sanding drywall and finishing the floors and all the other DIY home reno projects that raised a cloud of dust, and he emptied the vacuum bag into the can. The bag’s opening was the width of two fingers. Harlan stuck in his left index finger and his middle finger—the finger Lisa was always after him not to flip as he drove—and used them like tweezers to pull out tufts of dog hair and dirt and bits of food, all of it a dull grey. He wondered if this wasn’t some kind of parable: how all the wild colours of our modern life mix together to produce something bland and colourless. He pulled out pennies, a cork, the tabs from beer cans, a triple-A battery, half a dog biscuit, pine needles, a frayed shoelace, a couple of Jenn’s makeup remover wipes. Digging deeper into the bag, Harlan felt something big and hard, something too big to pull through the opening.

Withdrawing his fingers, he shook the bag over the garbage can until the object fell out. He squinted into the cloud of dust rising from the garbage can. From where he sat, he couldn’t say what it was. It looked the size and shape of a stubby carrot, only not the colour of a carrot. It was mostly black and grimy. Harlan drew the object from the bottom of the can and took it around to the other side of the van where he kept a light above his work bench. Taking off his mask, he turned the object over and over in the light.

It was a human finger. The black was the black of dried blood. The finger couldn’t have been in the bag long because it wasn’t rotten yet. Maybe a day. The whorls of the fingerprint were still intact. It had been severed almost at the knuckle, and by a sharp tool. There was nothing ragged about it like you’d expect if it had been yanked off or bitten by a dog. Harlan got a plastic baggie from the kitchen, and sealing the finger, he stowed it in the freezer compartment of his beer fridge. Then, opening the fridge, he got a can of beer and sat himself behind the garage for a think.

No need to panic. No need to call to the police. It might have been an accident. There might be an easy explanation why someone in his household had vacuumed up a human finger. Maybe he shouldn’t tell Lisa, at least not yet. She had a tendency to overreact. What if one of the kids had done it. Harlan didn’t know much about the law but he was certain that chopping off someone’s finger was a serious business. None of his kids had ever been in trouble with the law and he wasn’t sure Lisa could stand it if any of them went to jail. The twins were sixteen and so they would be treated as young offenders. No serious consequences. But Jenn was nineteen, an adult, at least in the eyes of the law. Then again, Harlan had a hard time believing Jenn could have chopped off someone’s finger. That was more the sort of thing you’d expect from the twins.

Harlan left his can of beer half empty on the patio and went inside. He poked his head into Jenn’s room and found her cross-legged on her bed and yakking on the phone with her boyfriend. Harlan waved. Jenn waved back, all the fingers of her left hand present and accounted for. He squinted at the right hand, noting how comfortably she held the phone with all five digits. Jenn pressed her palm to the phone and asked what he wanted.

Nothing. Just checking in.

Okay, and Jenn rolled her eyes.

Harlan found the boys in the basement playing video games. He watched how they held the controllers and he counted twenty digits in all.

I need to talk to you boys.

When Chas asked what, Wes took advantage of the momentary lapse in attention to blow up Chas’s jeep.

Boys, just pause it for a minute. Harlan and Lisa had been back not even half a day and, already, the kids were behaving as if their parents had never been gone. I want you to tell me straight up: did you two have a party here last night?

The boys looked at each other, then relaxed their shoulders and admitted that, yeah, they’d had a bit of a party, but only a few friends, nothing wild.

And Jenn? Was she in on it?

It was her, you know,

idea.

Boys, anything happen at this party of yours? An accident, say? Or a fight? Anybody get hurt?

The boys looked at each other and shook their heads.

And if I asked Jenn, she wouldn’t know anything either?

I guess not,

seeing as we were all together.

Boys, I’d like you to come out to the garage with me.

The three men crept through the house like commandos, looking left and right down each hallway to be sure Lisa didn’t see them. Harlan led the boys to the beer fridge in the garage, and as they stood like worshippers before a shrine, he took the baggie out of the freezer compartment. They gathered beneath the light of the work bench. The dog curled onto the concrete floor by the beer fridge and licked herself in indelicate places. Harlan opened the baggie and, using a pair of barbeque tongs, removed the finger and held it up for inspection. He looked like a surgeon with oversized instruments.

The boys gawked at the finger, saying things like whoa and is that what I think it is?

I found it in the vacuum cleaner.

The boys shrugged.

The bag was empty before your mom and I went away. Which means the finger got sucked up while we were gone.

No change in their expression.

So you two have no idea how it got there?

They shook their heads.

Harlan remembered the beer he’d left behind the garage. It was warmer than he liked, but still drinkable. Beer in one hand, tongs in the other, Harlan contemplated the finger where he’d lain it on the old wooden miter box. He had no idea how to read the boys. Sometimes they looked at one another and he knew they were up to their eyeballs in some kind of conspiracy. But he saw none of that now. He wanted to believe their ignorance was genuine. After another gulp of beer, he sent the boys back to their video games with a promise never to tell their mother what they had seen. When they were back to blowing each other up in hi-def Dolby 7.1 surround sound, Harlan went inside to fetch their sister. Give Jenn a chance to examine the finger. See if it stirred any recollections from the party the night before. As they stepped into the garage, Harlan told her he was about to show her something nasty and she was not to tell anybody.

Whatever, Dad.

Harlan stepped to the work bench, but the finger was gone. Underneath the bench, the dog lay chomping at something. Queenie! Harlan grabbed the dog at the back of the jaw and forced open its mouth, but it was too dark underneath the bench. By the time he had dragged the dog into the light, whatever she’d been chomping on had disappeared.

Damn. She just ate the evidence.

Evidence?

A finger. A human finger. It was in the vacuum cleaner.

Jenn gave no indication she knew what her father was talking about. He sent her back to her telephone with the same promise he’d extracted from the boys: don’t tell your mother.

Tossing the empty baggie into the garbage bin, Harlan took a second beer from the fridge and returned to his chair behind the garage. He needed to think about things. Thank God for beer. What is it they say? In vino veritas? In wine, truth? Harlan wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he found a kind of truth in beer. If he drank enough beer, it smoothed over the ragged edges. It solved life’s mysteries, not by giving answers, but by making them cease to matter. Harlan had no idea how a human finger had ended up in his vacuum cleaner. Harlan swallowed another mouthful of beer. To be truthful, it didn’t seem all that important.

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When Oliver was a boy, he used to wander with a stick through the family orchard, whacking at the high branches to knock down the best fruit. This is the image that came to mind whenever people asked about his writing. With pen in hand, he meandered through his thoughts, taking swipes at the best ideas, and if they were ripe, they dropped fresh to the page. Oliver knew he had only two novels left in him. As he knocked down those last ideas, he would polish the fruits and give them to his children, one for Jane, and the other for Tarzan. Heh, heh, heh. With one called Jane, it was inevitable that he should sometimes call the other one Tarzan, especially when the boy was so rambunctious, jumping on the good furniture and breaking dishes all the time.

Oliver missed that first doctor’s appointment, the one where the doctor would tell him what he already knew. He missed the appointment because he took the southbound train instead of the northbound train and was halfway downtown before he noticed his mistake. He would have taken his car but had misplaced the keys. At his second appointment, which was really his first, he sat on that chaise longue you find in every doctor’s office, the one with the crinkly white paper on top, and swung his legs back and forth like he was a child. The doctor asked if he had meant to wear two different shoes. He said he hadn’t noticed and asked what earthly difference it made that his shoes didn’t match.

On Saturday evening, Oliver summoned his children to dine with him at the castle. He knew that he lived in a bungalow, but he liked to call it his castle. The meal went wonderfully well even though he forgot the salt, and when it was done, Oliver pushed back his chair and announced to Josh and to Jane that it was time to play Lear and divvy up his kingdom. Josh said: It’s just Dad and more of his crap. Ever since Mom died—He would have gone on with his rant, but Jane told him to shut up and listen for once. Oliver smiled and explained that he had been to the doctor’s and the doctor confirmed for him what he had long suspected: he was beginning a journey down a gentle slope into a world of cognitive befuddlement. Josh said: It’s just Dad and more of his crap. Oliver countered by producing brochures he had taken from the doctor’s office. There were brochures about the changes they could expect, and there were brochures about support services available in the community.

Jane cried. She had long known something was wrong, but used Dad’s grief to explain away the lapses. If he got lost, she said he was lost in his memories with Mom. It was romantic, not clinical. If he forgot names or words, she said he had more important things pressing in on his mind. And if he grew angry or bewildered, she said he was an artist; the usual rules don’t apply to great spirits like his. But when her father laid the brochures on the table, she set aside the excuses. It was time to be honest about his condition. Oh, but Josh was angry. He refused to hear any of it. Before he could trust anything Dad said, he would call the doctor himself.

On Monday morning, while Josh was speaking to the doctor, Oliver began the first of his final novels. Each day was the same. He wrote longhand on foolscap until mid-afternoon, then copy typed his work on a computer Jane had helped him buy two years ago. Every evening, Jane stopped by to make sure her father had saved his work and that it had been backed up. This novel was too precious to lose.

Once a week, Jane took her father to visit an occupational therapist and together they worked on strategies to push back the encroaching beast. The occupational therapist suggested a memory box. They would decorate a cardboard box with fancy papers and ribbons, then they would fill it with letters and photos and knick knacks that  were meaningful to father. Every day they would sit for a while with the memory box, and as they pulled objects from the box, they would reminisce and tell stories. The objects in the box would anchor powerful associations. In effect, the objects would trap memories that might otherwise drift away.

Oliver wasn’t interested in making a memory box. The occupational therapist worried that this lack of interest signaled a greater deterioration than the doctor had suspected. But Jane thought differently. Oliver was anxious to write. He wanted to whack that fruit onto the page before it all turned to rot. As he viewed it, the only use for a memory box was to hold bushels of rotten fruit. Jane didn’t press him to make the memory box. Instead, she spent more time helping him to finish the first novel.

The novel took seven weeks to write. Jane was amazed at how quickly it went. The idea for the novel had been ripening so long in her father’s brain that it was mostly immune to this slow creep of forgetfulness. Writing it wasn’t so much the invention of fresh material as it was the recollection of an old friend from years gone by.

Jane printed a copy of the manuscript and placed it in a box. She took her father to a card shop where he chose a black and white photo of a boy on the front and a blank space on the inside. He wrote “To Josh. With Love. Dad” and taped it to the box. Jane went to Josh’s apartment but he refused to take the manuscript. It was more of Dad’s crap.

But Dad wrote it especially for you.

Bullshit, Josh said.

Sure he did.

I bet there’s another copy off to his agent.

He can’t remember his agent’s name.

Doesn’t matter. The damage is done.

Damage? What are you talking about?

Mining our lives—the intimate details—all for fun and profit.

Oh, Josh.

Even Mom’s death, for crissake.

That was a memoir.

Memoir? Is that what you call it?

When Jane set the box back on her father’s kitchen table, the old man smiled at it. Jane couldn’t read the smile. Did he understand what the return of the box meant?

I’d like a cigar now.

Oliver wasn’t supposed to smoke cigars, but there was still a stash in a humidor hidden underneath the guest bed where Jane now spent most of her nights. Inside the humidor was the last of the Montecristos Oliver had been working through when he finally agreed to stop. What the hell, and Jane fetched a Montecristo. She led her father onto the side porch and clipped and lit the cigar and took a few long drags herself before passing it to her father. Wait here, and she went inside where she poured out two tumblers each with three fingers of Scotch. Returning to the porch, she found her father rocking wistfully from side to side.

He’s my favourite son, you know.

He’s your only son.

I love him.

Oliver fell asleep with the cigar stuck to his lower lip. Jane stubbed out the cigar, then nudged her father up from his chair and inside to bed. She thought she might go back to the porch and finish her father’s cigar. On the way, she passed the box on the kitchen table. She had never read the novel straight through. She had only read it piecemeal as she helped to assemble it. Taking it up, she read until far into the next morning.

Jane couldn’t tell if the novel was any good. Critics looked favourably on her father’s works. They were literary. They were weighty. Although he had never won any major prizes, his work was regarded as solid and reliable. This novel read like all the others, so she presumed it, too, was solid and reliable. The plot drew the reader in like a gracious host. The voice was consistent and engaging. And the characters were full-bodied like the Montecristos and the Scotch. Even so, Jane had expected the novel to have more of Josh in it, or to address him in a more personal way. If the novel was for Josh, if it was crafted out of love, shouldn’t it read more like a memoir? or like an allegory of a father/son relationship? the tale of a dog and a pup, say?

The novel told the story of an ad executive approaching retirement who fears that the most he can say for himself is that he has devoted his life to the telling of lies. Once, he was an idealist. He joined demonstrations for the environment and marched for peace, but his interest in such things flagged as his career gobbled up his free time. Now, the aging ad executive finds himself haunted by an incident when he was a young father. He had a son named James who was rambunctious, jumping on the good furniture and breaking dishes. Exasperated, the young man struck the boy with the back of his hand and sent him howling to his room. In the days and weeks following this incident, the father grew morose and cynical. Mostly, he grew cynical about his own nature. All that marching for peace was hypocrisy. For his part, James forgot the incident. But memory is a funny thing. What we forget with our minds we sometimes remember in other ways. James seemed to remember the incident with a bitterness he carried into all his relationships.

Jane woke to the sound of banging at the front door and a woman’s voice halloo halloo. Jane started from bed—ten o’clock, oh damn—and cursed herself for reading late into the next morning. It was the neighbour three doors down, standing in the front hall and holding Oliver’s hand. Oliver had wandered off in his slippers and bathrobe. When he first woke up, there was no one in the kitchen, so he opened the front door, thinking it was the refrigerator. The neighbour found him rooting through her garbage cans looking for oranges.

Jane made her father a proper breakfast while he waited at the kitchen table and stared at the box that sat open across from him.

I read your novel last night.

Eh?

The book you wrote for Josh.

Josh.

Oliver drifted away. Because he was remembering less and less of recent times, Jane presumed that he had drifted into the world he once inhabited as a young man, or even as a child, maybe the orchard on the farm where he grew up.

Dad?

Eh?

You were going to write two novels.

I was?

One for Josh, and one for me.

Yes. Yes I was.

After breakfast, Oliver began the second novel. Jane sat him at his desk before a pad of foolscap. He took up his pen and, turning to her, said: My masterpiece. Jane was skeptical. The words didn’t flow as they had for the first. The ideas for this novel came from seeds he had sown later, and so they had less time to take root in his mind. Now, his ideas were as sparse as scrub in a desert. Sometimes, after finishing one phrase, he would stare out the window for thirty minutes before starting the next. Sometimes he merely copied a phrase he had already set down. Jane did her best to cross out the repetitions, to prod her father to write more, to keep his days as regimented as when he wrote the first novel, writing longhand on foolscap until mid-afternoon, then copy typing until supper. As the days proceeded, there was less and less to copy type.

The writing itself was odd. Oliver enjoyed periods of great clarity when he whipped off a page or two of cogent prose in a style that hearkened to his early days. But these periods were interrupted, and with increasing frequency, by episodes of disorganization that ran from top to bottom, skewering everything: theme, structure, syntax, even spelling. During these periods, his writing was a blathering mess. The contrast was unsettling to read.

After eight weeks, Oliver had written nearly a hundred pages of mostly unreadable nonsense. In the last several days, he had produced only a few sentences of material and all of it struck Jane as infantile. As with the writing, so with the rest of his life. He dozed more, became restless and argumentative, walked in his sleep, ate sparingly, and although he mostly knew who Jane was, he sometimes mistook her for his late wife, Jane’s mother. The nursing help that came to the house suggested perhaps the time had come to move Oliver into a residence where he could have round-the-clock support. Jane was a grown woman now, and wanted to be mature about the matter, but there was a part of her that resisted the decision, not because of guilt, but for a reason more childish. Josh had his novel; Jane wanted hers. She wanted to force her father to sit at his desk and finish what he had promised to do. She didn’t want a hundred-page record of a man’s last senile rantings; she wanted something with structure and form, with meaning and art. It wasn’t fair. What made things worse was that Josh rejected his gift. Somewhere in that mashed-up brain was a second novel—her father had said so himself—as fully formed as the first. But Jane was afraid she would never read it.

When they moved Oliver into the residence, Jane took a few things for his room, familiar items so he wouldn’t feel alienated and alone, pictures for his wall, photos for his night table. She also brought the manuscript in a box which she set on the desk, and beside it she set her father’s favourite pen and a fresh pad of foolscap. She understood that her father could no longer write, but it seemed somehow necessary to set out these materials. Necessary both for him, and for her.

Oliver lived another year in the residence. Jane visited as often as she could. Every visit was the same. After she had kissed her father hello, she would lift the lid from the box to see if he had written anything new.

When Oliver died, the administrator of the residence arranged for Jane to gather his personal effects from his room. The staff had already boxed most of his things and had stacked the boxes on the desk. When Jane arrived, she experience a momentary flash of panic when she thought the manuscript had gone missing, but there it was, shoved to the back against the wall. As always, Jane removed the lid from the box and looked at the hundred or so sheets of foolscap. She drew out the ream and riffled the pages.  She had hoped her novel would be the masterpiece, the culmination of a life’s work. The first time she had taken up this ream, in the days before she moved her father into the residence, she had tried to persuade herself that this was indeed a masterpiece. That explained why it was so different from everything that had gone before. It was expressionist ultra postmodern something-or-other. It was the very latest of the very latest. It was the manifesto for a movement as yet unnamed. Now, all she could see in it was the jibber jabber of a failing mind.

Jane returned the ream to its box and put the lid in place. She passed the box to the woman who had let her into the room: I don’t need this.

The woman dropped the box into the garbage bin.

Taking up her father’s pen, Jane slipped it into her purse. Maybe she would find a use for it.

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My project is a long novel which I expect will run to 250,000 words and take half a lifetime to finish. During the NaNoWriMo stint, I’ll focus on a novella length episode that will appear as a digression in the larger novel. The episode is a fictional adaptation of a real event which I first reported here—the bizarre discovery of a body in the basement of a church in Glasgow and subsequent revelation that the priest had been having sex with the deceased. I can’t help myself. I just have to write something about this. More details to follow in my next post.

For now, here’s the larger novel’s premise:

An angel of the Lord appears to an atheist and commands him to write a novel about a young Catholic woman. This is shocking to the atheist, not only because he doesn’t believe in angels, but also because he was born a Protestant man and therefore knows nothing about what it’s like to be a Catholic woman. Not to worry, says the angel. For the next forty nights (a nice round Biblical number), another angel of the Lord shall visit our atheist in his dreams and dictate the novel to him. Each morning when he wakes up, he must write all that he has been told. If he does so faithfully, then at the end of forty days, he will have the forty chapters of a completed novel.

For your reading pleasure, here is the first draft of the first two pages which introduce the premise:

I am Protestant by birth and atheist by inclination, which explains why I raised such an unholy ruckus when an Angel of the Lord appeared before me and issued a divine fiat. What bothered me was not the discovery that God does, in fact, exist. Why should it bother me? The creator of the universe, the Lord and Ruler of all that is was and ever shall be, the purveyor of all things bright and beautiful, etc., etc. is sufficiently remote from human concerns and so utterly disinterested in this vile little hellhole we have fashioned for ourselves that I find it unlikely our paths will ever cross—a variation on Pascal’s wager, I confess, but valid even for believers:  given that there is a God, behave as if He gives a shit, and if it proves that He doesn’t, where’s the harm in having lived a chaste life? Nor was it the discovery that his Divine Bigshot and Phallic Omnipotentate uses angelic lackeys, as if heaven were a banana republic dominated by a Western superpower. Since I am blissfully ignominious when it comes to politics and even moreso when it comes to corporate systems, what the hell do I care how God organizes his operations? FedEx, UPS, Purolator, the angel Gabriel? When it comes to delivering messages, one system is as good as the next.  Nor did it bother me that when, at last, the celestial clarion blurted its call, the message arrived as a command: imperative mood, non-negotiable, un-undoable, not-take-backable. Given that, statistically speaking, as one of seven billion inhabitants of the shit-fucked planet Earth, I am more likely to be on the receiving rather than giving end of commands, and given that the facts of my circumstances confirm this statistical likelihood (I receive generously from wife, children, mother, ghost of dead father, government, solicitor, bank manager, collection agencies, AA mentor, librarian, paper boy, and so on), I am amply inoculated against the terror-inducing effects of commands from higher authorities.

No. If there is anything about the angel’s message that scalds my keister, it lies in the message itself and not in the manner of its delivery. For an Angel of the Lord said unto me: Thou shalt write a novel and its protagonist shall be a Roman Catholic, and a young woman to boot. To which I answered that, while I did not wish to appear ungrateful nor disobedient, nevertheless it is a fact that I was born Protestant and subsequently developed atheistic tendencies.  How could I write convincingly about a Roman Catholic woman? And why would I want to?  The Angel of the Lord answered my second question first, proclaiming that I would want to write such a novel because it would afford me the unsurpassed honour of serving the Lord God Most High (hereinafter the LGMH). When I suggested that the LGMH would not care one way or the other, the Angel of the Lord bowed its head, scuffed a foot in the dirt, and grudgingly agreed. Nevertheless, the aforementioned Angel promised that over the course of the next forty days (or nights, to be precise) there would appear to me in my sleep heavenly dreams which, should I record them each subsequent morning, would furnish me with the chapters of a novel.

In effect, this novel was dictated to me by God. I offer this account as an explanation for the occasional error which pops up in the text. Also its sometimes prolixity. And the odd inconsistency. I mean, anybody even nominally familiar with the Bible will recognize that, while God was a marvelous writer, his editorial staff sucked. If Irenaeus and his merry crew of fascists had slashed the canon in half, more people would have bothered to read the damned book and would have been spared countless inconsistencies (and all the pointless disputes they spawned).

If my novel has suffered similar defects, I blame God. Go to Him for your refund.

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Note: Part way through writing this piece of flash fiction, I got my testicles caught in a band saw. Industrial accidents are a horrible thing. Always wear protective clothing.

Billy-Bob turned to Jethro and said: “Hey man, let’s drive into town and get us some pussy.”

“Yeah, BB. You know there’s nothing I love better’n driving into town for some pussy.”

“Hey man, let’s take your Mustang.”

“Yeah, BB. She’s a sweet ride. Nothing better’n driving around in this here Mustang—’cept maybe some pussy.”

“I know, we can drive your Mustang into town for some pussy.”

…

Billy-Bob turned to Jethro and said: “Hey man, will you look at that sky!”

“Yeah, BB. I love when the clouds blow in all fluffy like that. Makes me think of goose-down pillows.”

“Hey man, do you smell those flowers?”

“Yeah, BB. Nothing better’n the smell of flowers on a sunlit day.”

“I’m feeling lonely. Wanna hold my hand?”

“Sure thing. Let me set down my Chardonnay.”

“Hey man, why’s that cat playing so close to the band saw?”

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I felt far away and shrugged.  I didn’t speak until the cop rhymed off the cliché about poets and passion.  On the coroner’s report, there’s probably a tick box that says “death by poetic temperament”.

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.  As the medics tagged and bagged her, I led the cop to the sitting room where I explained:

She was a great talent.  But she could only write the good stuff when she was in her dark moods.  In happy moments, the best she could produce was a sing-song rhyming verse fit for lining the diaper pail.  When this happened, she grew frustrated, then despondent.  She would say:  “I’ve lost my touch.  I’ll never write a good poem again.”  Then the depression would creep over her.  When those dark moods roiled her brain, the poems came out fully formed:  brilliant treacherous pieces that struck to the very heart.  With these poems came a sense of accomplishment.  She hadn’t lost her touch after all.  The relief brought happiness, but the happiness brought an end to her dark poems.  What followed was a succession of banal poetic turds, which in turn plunged her into despair and another series of masterworks.

“It was the roller coaster,” I said.  “It was the poetic roller coaster that killed her.”

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“A symposium, eh?”  Dr. Fenton leaned back in his pleather chair, fingers interlocked across his considerable gut.

On one corner of Fenton’s desk stood a small bust of Lord Byron.  Dean entertained a momentary fantasy of using the statuary to bludgeon his superior until the old man’s brains were spattered across the shelves of books.  But Dean restrained his violent impulse; it was crude and he would be caught.  Besides, when he fingered the bust of Lord Byron, he discovered that it was a plastic bobblehead.  Nobody ever died from a bobblehead bludgeoning.

“On what, pray tell?”  Fenton spoke with a smug condescension.

“The Really Long Jest, sir.”

Fenton stared at Dean with a blank expression.

“I see you’re familiar with it”

An obtuse joke, but surely a man of Fenton’s stature would be acquainted with the Really Long Jest.

“Details, Dean.  Give me details.”

“Sir, does the Evelyn Cormack affair ring a bell?”

“The poor librarian?”

“Precisely.”

“The one who—”

“From the Nazi collection.”

“No!”  Fenton was incredulous.

“Yes!”

“A symposium on that piece?”

“Precisely.”

“That’s downright dangerous.”

“With all due respect, sir.  No one ever built a reputation by playing it safe.”

“True enough.”

Dr. Fenton sucked thoughtfully on the end of a pen, then rested it in the thatch above his upper lip.  Dean imagined himself rushing to Fenton’s side and with a swift stroke of his arm, mashing the pen up the man’s left nostril, piercing the cranium and lodging the pretentious writing implement in the man’s frontal lobe.  If it didn’t kill the man, then surely it would lobotomize him.

“Whatever happened to the poor woman?”

“Still in an institution, sir.”

“Is she still—you know—”

“Sir?”

“Non compos mentis if you know what I mean.”

“I hear she spends all day staring at a blank wall.”

“A damn shame!”  And Fenton shook his head.

“She has to wear an adult diaper.”

“Gehim-tote geschichte.”

“Gehim-tote geschichte.”

For a moment, the two men shared what might almost pass for camaraderie.

# # # # #

In 1942, British intelligence caught wind of a German plot code-named Gehim-tote geschichte.  Rumours and hearsay.  Nothing concrete.  According to MI6, the German High Command had devoted considerable resources to the development of English language stories.  Its aim was to produce a story utterly devoid of meaning.  The technical challenges of such a project were enormous.  We who live in the age of the internet often fail to appreciate that in 1942 a story with meaningless content was all but inconceivable.  The chief barrier, then as now, was that even where a writer kept his mind utterly blank and produced a work of complete drivel, nevertheless his readers might read fresh meaning into the blank work, much as some people today see the Virgin Mary burnt onto a piece of toast.  How, then, to achieve a work of über pointlessness, a work both devoid of meaning and incapable of supporting meanings read into it by the reader?

The project was the brainchild of Goebbels.  He had reasoned that an utterly pointless story would incapacitate its reader.  It would be so mind-numbing that the reader would stare blankly at the pages in a permanent trance-state.  Once the Germans developed their story, they planned to exploit contacts on the editorial board of The Times.  Imagine!  The sheer gall!  To distribute a story of unadulterated drivel in a newspaper!  Such a thing had never been tried before.

Der Führer was delighted at the plan’s efficiency.  Even if only two percent of the paper’s subscribers read the story, that would be enough to establish a viral effect.  Imagine how it would proceed.  Sir High Street would sit to breakfast with the Sunday Times, first reading of the Hun’s terrible progress through France as he slurped up his soft-boiled egg, then shifting to the Times Literary Supplement for something lighter to read with his toast.  There, he would spy a curious tale, bland in its cadence and alluringly dull in its point of view.  A few minutes later, Lady High Street would enter the room and discover her husband staring blankly at his teacup, unresponsive, as if he had suffered a stroke.  Alarmed at first, our Lady High Street would cast about, then settle her gaze upon her husband’s hands still clutching at The Times.  She would wonder what was so bloody important that her husband continued to clutch at it even after the intelligence had faded from his eyes like the light from an extinguished candle.  She might then gaze at the story, as her husband had, and find herself likewise seduced by its subliminal deceit.  Enter the maid and later the butler.  In the afternoon, perhaps the nanny would stumble upon the stupefied quartet, followed by the older children.  In the manner of dominoes, Goebbels’ dastardly story would bring down entire British households.

The plan was never executed, and after the first day of May, 1945, when Goebbels committed suicide, no one could say for certain if his crack team of storytellers had developed even a prototype of the Gehim-tote geschichte.  Rumours faded to wisps and the matter was forgotten until several years ago when an obscure New England college became the beneficiary of an estate.  The late Fritz Unbelegterkopf had been a member of the faculty, a modest professor of linguistics who, when inebriated at Friday afternoon wine and cheese parties, told stories of his aunt who had served as a stenographer under Goebbels at the Ministry of Propaganda when the lunatic had first conceived of Operation Gehim-tote geschichte.  The aunt was so badly affected by the early drafts that, after Germany’s defeat, she spent most of her time filing her nails and chewing gum.  Yes, Gehim-tote geschichte was real, the old professor slurred.  But the college had no evidence until Unbelegterkopf died.

Most of the late professor’s papers went to the German Studies Department to round out its Nazi collection.  But the man earmarked one box for the English Department, sealing it with packing tape and labeling it with a bold warning:  DO NOT OPEN.  Dean had joined the faculty only that year and so was too junior to participate in the debates.  To open; or not to open.  That was the question.

Opinions ran the gamut, from the historical (was there sufficient evidence to suppose the Gehim-tote geschichte was real?) to the military (since the Gehim-tote geschichte had been developed as a weapon, was it properly a matter for study by literary scholars?) to the philosophical (what is the truth value of an imperative sentence?) to the legal (could the note affixed to the box be regarded as a codicil with the force of a testamentary document?).

As one might expect, the lawyers prevailed.  The college would have continued unblemished in its long tradition of cover-your-ass scholarship if not for the intrepid Evelyn Cormack, a librarian renowned for her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, who could no more leave newly received materials uncatalogued than Edith Piaf could sing love songs in Klingon.  Staying late one Friday evening, Ms. Cormack sliced through the packing tape and began the painstaking process of logging each item in the library database.  On Monday morning, a colleague discovered her sitting in a puddle of her own urine, eyes glazed to a milky white, and muttering meaningless platitudes to herself.  It was fortunate for the college that the colleague had attended some of those wine and cheese parties when the drunken professor Unbelegterkopf told his tales of the Gehim-tote geschichte.  Could the tales be true?  Daring not even a glance, the librarian stuffed all the papers back into the box and resealed it, storing the box in the darkest corner of the building.

# # # # #

Dean’s symposium was a ripping success.  It had a certain cross-discipline cachet and drew academics from all around the globe.  Perhaps it was inaccurate to call this event Dean’s symposium.  Although Dean was the driving force behind the proceedings, Dr. Fenton took pains to make it his affair.  He was worse than a plaid suit.  Snatching the microphone from Dean on the first day, Fenton interrupted the welcome message with remarks of his own.  Those of Dean’s colleagues who grasped the dynamics of the situation rolled their eyes and groaned but were surprised at Dean’s equanimity.  He looked on with an almost beatific smile.  Later, at the opening luncheon, when Fenton delivered a few off-the-cuff anecdotes that ran on for half an hour, Dean again surprised his colleagues by maintaining an implacable countenance.

As one would expect, Fenton delivered the opening paper, a piece on the provenance of the Really Long Jest, and effectively wrote himself into the account:  it wasn’t the head librarian, but Fenton himself, who had discovered the poor Evelyn Cormack in her state of blethering discombobulation; it was Fenton who recognized the heinous work of the late Joseph Goebbels; it was Fenton who saved civilization as we know it from the viral ravages of the Gehim-tote geschichte.  Even then, Dean held his tongue and smiled.

The next day, Fenton again let it be known in a hundred different ways that the symposium was his brainchild.  The credit was to him and to no one else.  When a neuropsychiatrist from Berlin spoke about the neurological mechanisms which make it possible to develop a story-as-weapon, Fenton leapt to the podium and thanked the man, but not before offering an embarrassing joke about a psychiatrist a rabbi and a hooker.  That afternoon, he introduced Noam Chomsky by regaling the delegates with tales of the renowned linguist’s prostate gland.  And that evening, at a special performance of Wozzeck mounted by the local opera company, Fenton prepared himself by shaving off his beard and leaving behind only that portion of his mustache immediately below the nose.  He made his entrance by goose-stepping down the centre aisle of the theatre.

No one was sad when Dr. Fenton failed to attend the final proceedings on Friday.  Nevertheless, because they had grown accustomed to his annoying habits, they voiced curiosity at his absence.  Dean assured the delegates that this was a normal Friday for Dr. Fenton and he staved off further questions with a wink and vague tippling gestures.  In fact, Dean knew full well that Dr. Fenton’s incapacity was far more serious than a simple case of inebriation.  In fact, Dean knew full well that Dr. Fenton sat splayed on a chair staring at a blank wall in the library basement.

Fenton had been sitting in the same chair since the previous evening when Dean confronted him alone in his office.  Dean had cornered him there and, taking up the Lord Byron bobblehead, declared the Gehim-tote geschichte a hoax.

Fenton was furious.  “Bite your tongue, young man.”

But Dean was insistent.

If Fenton had been a priest, he would have accused Dean of blasphemy; he would have excommunicated him; he would have burned the young man at the stake.

Dean returned the bobblehead to its place on the desk and raised his hands in a placating gesture.  “I’ll make you a wager,” he said.  “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks I can read that story and walk away with all my noodles intact.”

Fenton had been drinking just enough to let his natural belligerence get the best of his common sense.  He shook Dean’s hand and together the men crossed the quadrangle to the library.  Although the library was closed, Fenton had a key, and they made their way to the basement unimpeded.  For the duration of the symposium, the library had placed the lone box on a table in a basement seminar room.  While Fenton stood in the doorway, Dean rifled through the yellowed pages, stock paper imprinted with the official seal of the Third Reich and watermarked with a swastika.  At last, Dean’s fingers settled on the only pages written in English, a story, the Really Long Jest.  Dean held the pages under the florescent lights and began to read the completely pointless story.  When he was done, he set the pages face-down on the table, looked up at Fenton and smiled.

“As you can see, I’m not soft in the head.”

Dr. Fenton was stunned.  “I thought the story was authentic.”

“Apparently, we’ve been duped.”

“Let me see.”  Fenton stepped into the room and the door swung shut behind him.  He took up the pages and began to skim.

Dean watched the man’s eyes move line by line down the first page, then on to the second and the third, slowing as they neared the end, then coming to a rest on the final word.  The eyes glazed over.  The man’s breathing slowed.  The hands clutched at the pages and ceased to move.

“Dr. Fenton?”

The chair of the English Department did not answer.

Dean waved a hand before the older man’s eyes, but they remained unresponsive.  He eased the man onto a chair, then reached into the man’s jacket pocket and retrieved a billfold.  He paid himself one hundred dollars in satisfaction of the wager.  Not a penny more.  Not a penny less.  Dean prided himself on his scrupulous honesty.  And, no, he did not regard it as dishonest, when making his wager with Dr. Fonten, to omit the fact that he was dyslexic.

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When Ford sees me cutting the grass for the home-schooler’s little garden party, he pesters me something fierce, so I promise that after school’s done for the year, he can have a go at it. The boy’s almost as tall as me so there’s no question anymore of him reaching the pedals. On the morning when Em tears off to the spa, Ford and I walk through the fields to the drive shed which is on the south side of the barn. It’s a newer building of corrugated steel and set on a smooth concrete pad. I pull the tractor onto the gravel in front of the shed and shut it off, then get Ford to climb up with me so’s I can show him the throttle and the ignition, the clutch and the gear shift, accelerator and brake. It’s not at all like Em’s car with its automatic transmission. That’s what Ford knows best. At first it seems confusing to him; he can’t believe driving a tractor is so complicated, but I ease him into it by telling him to treat the whole business of driving like it’s a game. There’s a big enough space out there that he can ramble around without fear of hitting anything. He can practise starting and stopping, shifting into gear, slowing into turns, backing up with a hitch, popping wheelies. Maybe not popping wheelies but I add that to see if I can put a smile on his face. He’s been sitting all this time with a grave look on his face like he’s deciding the fate of nations. While Ford sits in his high chair reviewing everything in silence, I haul out the mower and hitch it to the tractor. Then I tell Ford to start her up.

It’s painful to watch Ford jerk forward, then skid to a halt on the gravel. The uncertainty. The knowledge that I’m watching. The fear that I’m judging. There comes a time when I have to turn my back and give him the freedom to feel his own way, but I got no idea how to judge when that time has come. I guess turning my back is my gift to him. But knowing when to do it is my gift to me. Ford eases up on the clutch and the tractor lurches forward again. He smiles at me as his head snaps forward. I smile back, motioning for him to steer off the gravel and into the field. The tractor bumps and lurches and Ford sways from side to side, and when I see him, anxious at first but grinning broadly as he catches on, I discover for the first time in months that I’m happy. It ain’t that I was unhappy a couple months ago and only now have turned happy like a change in the weather. It’s more a change of my inclination. The dreams have stopped. I’m feeling rested again. My mind is clear.

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What do you do if the subway breaks down mid-tunnel and you have to pee?  If Leonard Cohen unexpectedly arrives for dinner, how close should you let him get to your wife?  What do you say to a psychiatrist who shows an unnatural interest in your brains?  With more wit than wisdom, David Allan Barker offers 28 short stories which answer these and other pressing questions.

I had originally thought to name the book after the tag I use here at nouspique –> Terrors of the 21st Century.  Jack Cooper wins the book-naming contest by tipping the scales in favour of Sex With Dead People.  As a prize, Jack wins a free copy–wait, it’s already free.  As a prize, Jack gets a mention in the acknowledgments.  Ah, literary immortality.  And why not?  After all, he’s the musician who set a poem of mine to music.

In case you were wondering, the corpse feet on the cover belong to my wife.  Please keep the frigid jokes to yourselves.  Actually, it’s quite the contrary, and that posed a technical problem for me.  After all the photoshopping, I noticed an error, but being lazy and frustrated, I let it lie (so to speak).  Do you see it?  The feet have bulging veins.  If this was really a corpse, the veins wouldn’t show.  It takes a pumping heart to make veins do that.  Or is it arteries?  I can never keep that one straight.

Presumably I will continue to write tales of suburban banality and post them here at nouspique, so look for a sequel in a year or two.

Here’s the extended description:

In Sex With Dead People, David Allan Barker introduces us to a zombie psychiatrist, a vengeful tree, alien rednecks, a horny sasquatch, an aphasic priest in a whorehouse, and a block party for suburban cannibals.  At the same time we confront the frustrations of suburbia in all its banality:  pretentious neighbours, waste disposal disasters, lawn-care rivalries, dehumidifiers run amok, invasive bugs, perfumes that smell like urine pucks, and labyrinthine roads through communities where each house looks like every other.  Then, of course, we have the title story, Sex With Dead People (which has nothing to do with necrophilia, in case you were wondering).  Here, we discover one of the horrible truths of the 21^st century:  I forgot what it is.  Oh yeah, people have short attention spans.  No, that’s not it.  Maybe something to do with memory.

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“This is beneath me,” the old man muttered.

Igor shuffled to the faux-antique globe and cracked it open.  He poured out three fingers of fifteen year old Balvenie and set the glass within the circle of light on his boss’s desk.  The amber liquid refracted the light in rich and complex ways, no doubt mirroring the rich and complex effect it would have on Mr. Panofsky’s palette.

“Thank you, Igor.”

Boris took up the glass and leaned back in his pleather chair.  He waved to the shelves which rose to the ceiling, then he waved to the stacks of books that ringed his desk like palisades.

“They tell me, Igor, that these are obsolete.”

The old man’s eyes grew moist.  He drained the glass and asked for another.  As Igor returned to the globe, the old man muttered something about those damned ebooks.  “Everything’s changing so fast.  A global swill bucket.  A race to the bottom.  There was a time, Igor – and you’ve been with me long enough to remember it – there was a time when publishing was an esteemed enterprise.  Now, any two-bit hack with a blog can publish something, even if it IS a load of crap.”

Igor set a fresh glass of Scotch by the edge of the desk and slid it to his boss.  As Boris took up the glass, he pointed emphatically to the shelves closest to Igor.

“Take something.”

Igor hesitated, knowing their value to the old man.

“Go ahead.  Hell, I never read any of ‘em anyways.  Too damned precious.”

Igor found a signed first edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.  It was the biggest heaviest book he’d ever held.  He opened the book to the inside cover and read the inscription:

My dear friend Bores,

All the best, DFW

Igor wondered if his boss had noticed the spelling mistake.

“There was a time…”  Boris let his voice get loud, as was his habit after two drinks.  “There was a time, my friend, when the book was a great thing.  A source of strength.  A symbol of empowerment.  For the little people.  A rallying cry.  A reason to hope.  Now, every Tom, Dick and fricken Mary wants to be empowered.  Water down a perfectly good symbol.  Drink your Scotch neat, my friend.  Drink your Scotch neat.”  Boris raised his glass, but it was empty.  He slammed the glass onto his desk and demanded another.

Igor left his new book on the corner of the desk and returned to the globe.  After he had poured a third glass of Scotch, Boris waved Igor around to his side of the desk.

“Come, let’s sing one of the old songs.”  Boris wanted to sing Waltzing Matilda but Igor didn’t know that one.  For him, the old songs were the folk songs of his native Romania.  He had no idea who this Matilda was, but he was certain she was nothing compared to his Ivana.

After a couple verses, Waltzing Matilda came to a crashing halt.  Boris had slammed his glass onto the desk and some of his beloved Scotch splashed onto the sheets of numbers.  The old man scrambled to save his Scotch, holding the papers in a “U” above his open mouth and draining the amber fluid down his gullet.  He smiled and declared that it’s a sin to waste good Scotch, then laid out the sheets to dry on his desk.

“You know, Igor,” the old man said, “I didn’t call you in so you could serve me Scotch all evening.”

“Of course not.”  Igor picked up the copy of Infinite Jest.  “You called me in to give me this.”

“Er, well, whatever.”  Boris gave a lopsided smile.  “Igor, I called you in to tell you this:  you’re fired.”

The two men stared at one another across the desk, Boris with his tall frame and haughty eyebrows, Igor with his dwarfish mien and hunched back.  Igor thought of Ivana.  Maybe she would leave him if he could no longer afford to buy her nice gifts.  Who would bother with a man like him if he couldn’t also offer gifts?  Igor wondered, too, at the abruptness of the announcement.  Boris hadn’t couched his words in pleasant euphemisms.  Instead, he had drunk himself to a place of courage.  He had used the Scotch as a surrogate to say for him the words he was too cowardly to say for himself.  Igor felt his panic and bewilderment transform into rage.

“Twenty-five years!” he shouted.

“Actually twenty-four and three quarters.”

“A long time.  Half my life.  I’ve given half my life to you and your publishing house.”

“Now Igor.”

“Don’t you ‘now Igor’ me.”

Igor’s voice had risen to a scream.  He felt the blood rise hot to his cheeks.  He felt his heart thump loud in his chest.  An energy seized his limbs and moved him like a man possessed.  He dashed around the desk holding the great book high above his head.  Boris tried to rise from his chair but stumbled for all the Scotch in his veins.  Igor drew down the book upon the old man’s head and was amazed at how the body went limp and toppled onto the desk.  The cheek lay flat against the scattered pages and the comatose eyes stared at the shelves of books.

“You bastard!” Igor screamed.  Again, he slammed the book against the old man’s head, and again, and again, so many times he lost count.  Blood flowed from under the head, clotting the hair and obscuring all the old man’s precious numbers.  Igor took up his signed first edition of Infinite Jest even though it was spattered with blood.  Panofsky was right.  The old books were a source of empowerment.  Feeling strong, Igor ran with his book into the night.

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Johnny was alone in the shop, hunched over the drafting table and working up another cell for his graphic novel.  He drew in black and white.  He said it enhanced the novel’s bleak mood.  There had been no customers at Ralph’s all day.  No one had set foot in the shop even to ask questions or to look at designs on the wall.  Maybe the boarded-up window gave the impression that Ralph’s was out of business.  Johnny figured it was more than that.  There had been two appointments for today, booked last week, but one had called to cancel and the other didn’t show up.  Johnny took me out the front door and showed me how the plywood and the brick above it had been splattered with eggs.  He had tried to scrub it clean, but egg is a bitch to get off, especially when it runs into the cracks between the bricks.  While he was emptying his pail down the alley catch basin, someone ran by with a can of spray paint and left behind a big swastika.

“You’re not Jewish, are you?”

“Does it matter?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you were Jewish, a swastika would make sense.”

“Who said things have to make sense?”

We stared at the plywood shopfront while people walked around us on the sidewalk.  My first thought was to greywash the plywood, but I scolded myself for my conventional middle-class petit-bourgeois knee-jerk instincts.  This wouldn’t be consistent with Johnny’s anarchist principles, but again I scolded myself.  Consistent?  Principles?  More detritus from my conventional middle-class petit-bourgeois knee-jerk life.  What would Johnny do?  WWJD?  I laughed and told Johnny I wanted to get one of those bracelets.  Wear him like a religion.

“Everybody’s seen the video.”

“So?”

“They’ll shun me like I’m that Puritan who fucked goats.”

“The world’s got ADD.”

“You think?”

“Get a new window and you’ll be fine.”

We got take-out at Young Lok’s and ate it in the shop, me in the barber’s chair and Johnny at his drafting table.  When we were done, I propped open the front door and turned on all the lights, including the neon “Open” sign that Johnny had forgotten he owned.  It was late—after closing time—but why not open things up?  I went into the back and found the bottle of Johnny Walker.  I poured myself a glass and drank until it crossed my eyes and burned my throat.  The warm after-burn felt good and helped to clear my sinuses, bubbling up the back of my throat and into my brain.  Johnny was angry I hadn’t poured any for him, but I told him he couldn’t have any whiskey until he had dealt with his client.  He didn’t understand until I lay back in the barber chair and pulled off my top.

“The rose needs shading.”

“And colour.”

“No colour.”

“A black rose?”

“Black as my heart.”

Johnny laughed—the first time since I’d gotten home.  When I had found him hunched over his drafting table, lit by a single bulb, it was as if I had stumbled into a crypt.  He had drawn down upon himself such a weight of gloom that I worried it might crush him.  It was a relief, then, to see the corners of his mouth rise and the lips part by a sliver.  He set to work with his usual intensity—usual because it came from concentration, not from moodiness.  When he was done and had taped a gauze patch to my chest, he rewarded himself with two mouthfuls of whiskey straight from the bottle and after plunking the bottle onto the drafting table, said:  “Let’s go out.”

First, we went to the Rivoli.  We ordered drinks before we realized there wouldn’t be any music.  There was a poetry reading and it was boring so we chugged our drinks and moved on to the Horseshoe.  There, we ordered more drinks and split a plate of chips while we listened to a rockabilly bluegrass country kind of band wailing away about heartache and misery.  Not exactly my thing so we drifted to Cameron House.  By then, I had drunk enough that I was feeling wobbly in my gut, and when I looked up at the giant cockroaches stuck to the outside of the building, they seemed to quiver as if they were struggling into life, and I must have gasped or said something astonishing because Johnny eased me to the curb across the street and there we sat, me complaining about the stinging on my chest and Johnny claiming he had just the thing for me, which he pulled from a pocket and rolled right there on his knee and lit with a wooden match he had struck on the curb (a brief flare in the moonlight, held to the tip of his cigarette before it died), inhaling until his lungs seemed like they would burst, then letting out the sweetly acrid smoke and passing me the joint.

I don’t smoke this stuff, or not much (never before I met Johnny and only a couple times since) because I don’t like the idea of losing control and because it doesn’t deliver as promised, always a paranoid edge to it that leaves me disillusioned about the mellow, but I took it anyways because I knew it would blunt the stinging on my chest and because, well, fuck, I’d finished three drinks already, which meant I was mostly inoculated against the paranoid edge, so after we had finished and Johnny had butted out on the pavement, we went laughing stumbling into Cameron House where a band of kids was playing ska so loud we couldn’t hear ourselves for shouting, but it was good, a relief, a hiding place from watchful judging eyes, except maybe for the bouncer’s eyes which, once they saw Johnny’s raccoon face with eggplant nose, gave him a looking up and down as he walked past, but that wasn’t so bad because we knew that at least if it was a bouncer giving us a going over, he wasn’t doing it at the prompting of some patronizing passive-agressive for-your-own-good ideology but was simply keeping us from breaking tables and throwing bottles at the band, speaking of which, when I looked closely through swaying bodies and in the spaces between shoulders and heads, I thought I could see Stephen at the keyboards, still with a soggy unlit cigarillo between his teeth, still with a sombrero hanging from his back, salt-and-pepper hair glistening beneath the stage lights, bopping his head to the beat and tinkling his ivories far into the night, or at least as far into the night as we could see, because we left not long after midnight, wandering back to Johnny’s place with a beer buzz on the brain and that dull muffled pillowhead feeling you get when you step into the cool night air from a room filled with sound.

First we ducked south of Queen to the alley behind and ran through a dark gauntlet of leering painted figures until we spied, huddled in a doorway, three people who called out as if they knew us—or at least me—which I couldn’t verify without creeping closer and finally joining them in the shadows and drawing near enough to study their faces which (surprisingly) belonged to Obama, Bruni and Sarkozy (surprisingly because, like the rest of the world, I believed they had departed once the Summit was over and they had delivered their farewell speeches), the latter of whom informed us they had dodged their handlers so they could spend one more night in this fair town of hogs and cogs, this city that never thinks, this banquet of glass and steel served up on a platter of concrete, this suburban solar system wheeling its way around a bright centre of money, this celestial parking lot where work is a brief interlude on the commute to nowhere, this—Bruni elbowed her husband in the gut, telling him to stop waxing so lyrical, begging him to be more respectful of the young lady (meaning me) as it was her (meaning my) hospitality they were taxing and, being compliant by nature, and, being intoxicated by wine, the Frenchman demurred, and when the trio had emerged from the shadows, I heard the clink of bottles, one against another, and understood that whatever the fresh sights of this fair town, they would be mediated by alcohol, blunting the clarity of an otherwise sharp plan:  to cast aside the city viewed from 35,000 feet, the broad strokes, the topographic maps, the grand statistics and smug trivia, and to replace these with the taste of grit in the mouth, the buzz of a local wine, the man down the road, with a hand in his pants who dreams of a lover in Parkdale, the stories of unsolved murders and hockey legends, the foot in the running shoe washed ashore on Hanlan’s Point while a woman lies naked on the sand, the men who play chess when the weather allows while God walks by on the other side of the street, the Chinese women who drift through Kensington Market wondering aloud in Cantonese what the hell happened to the neighbourhood, in short, all those fine-grained details one misses when breezing in and out of a place on a military transport helicopter.

The next morning, I woke up beside Johnny, who continued to snore as I eased myself naked from the bed.  My head throbbed, especially when I pulled aside the towel that covered the window.  I had to go to work.  It was expected.  I had no clothes except those I had worn yesterday.  That statement assumes my unwillingness to return to my own apartment for fresh clothes.  That assumption is correct, not because I dislike fresh clothes, but because I was unwilling to do anything that required me to jostle my head.  A trip back to my own apartment—especially if it involved public transit—would most certainly jostle my head.  I groaned getting into the shower.  I groaned getting out of the shower.  I groaned putting on my clothes.  I groaned eating my breakfast.  I groaned clomping down the stairs and onto the sidewalk.  The swastika didn’t seem so bad in the morning shade.

Rolling around inside my addled head was a protozoic intention to quit my job.  Walking south to Adelaide, my single-celled intention evolved.  It grew legs and became a fantasy.  I would storm O’Toole’s office, like Freedom in that French painting, La Libertée, one black-rosed tit hanging out and pointing the way, a revolutionary nipple cowing power wherever it went:  J’accuse!  You are complicit!  You are guilty!  And so am I as long as I remain in your employ.  I must leave.  It is a matter of integrity!  A matter of high principle!  Gordon, O’Toole & Spence, LLP aligns itself with power.  This weekend I have seen with my own eyes how power functions, the abuses it perpetrates, the lies it tells.

By the time I arrived at the lobby to the building, my resolve had dissipated like fog beneath an oppressive sun.  Riding the elevator, I studied my reflection in the polished steel.  Had it been Johnny in my place, he would have seen the clear signs of a new and radical knowledge.  He could show off his crooked nose like a souvenir.  I had no souvenir to show off.  If there was anything I could offer the world as evidence of a new and radical knowledge, it was a look in my eyes, a chill that started in the corners and spread like the lines of frost across the surface of a dark pond.

In reception, the gum-smacking girl said Oh my God this and Oh my God that, but I walked past without answering her.  At my desk, I gathered a few personal effects and stuffed them into my satchel:  a couple photos, an extra pair of shoes, a mug with my name on it.  Like a child about to dive from a dock, but fearing the cold water below, I closed my eyes and burst into O’Toole’s office.

“Randy, we need to—”

I opened my eyes.  It was early, not yet nine o’clock.  I hadn’t expected O’Toole to be with a client.  Already he had pulled off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair.  Already he had rolled up his shirt sleeves, revealing his strangely dried-up turkey wattle elbow skin.  Looking over the reading glasses perched on his nose, he smiled and waved me further into the room.

“Randy, there’s something—”

“Come in, come in.  There’s someone—”

“I can’t—”

“Maggie tells me you’ve been through quite an ordeal this weekend.  We had a bit of an adventure ourselves.”  O’Toole motioned to a man seated across from him, a man who did not turn in his chair when I entered the room.  All I saw of the man was a broad back in short sleeves and a pug-dog fold of skin where the head joined the neck.

Stepping to the spare chair, I saw that the client was Michael O’Toole.  Although I saw him on Monday morning, that came from a fragmentary glance.  Here, I saw that he was heftier than in his book photo, and older too.  Older than his brother.  With an introduction and a handshake, I told our client that I read his book.  Delight flared in his eyes.  “In snatches,” I said.  “Between protests.”

Randy leaned over his desk:  “I gave it to her on Friday.”

“So you’re an activist?”

“Not on Friday.”

“And then you read my book?”

“And then I spent a night in jail.”

“What did you think of it?”

“It was horrible.”

Michael frowned:  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Our eyes met exactly at the instant we recognized our misunderstanding.  I was apologetic, verging on obsequious.  In turn, Michael grimaced, maybe for fear I would bend over and kiss his ass, what with all my I’m sorries and Really it was wonderfuls and So insightfuls and Helped me clarify my own thinkings, but more likely for embarrassment at having been found out as a small “n” narcissist.  We stared at one another like we were spies in a Bond film, each meeting our opposite number for the first time, betraying a collegial feeling even though we had sworn to despise one another.  I was the Russian, with a name like Oxana or Natasha, and with a penchant for exploding pens.  And who would deny that Michael was the Brit?  You could see it in his curmudgeonly comportment and in his fly-away eyebrows.  There were scissors shoved to the extreme westerly edge of Randy’s desk and they cried out to me.  No, they did not cry out to be shoved through Michael’s chest.  They cried out for me to snip away the shrubbery that decorated the man’s brows.

Randy was rambling loquacious about their Monday morning adventure and how it had caused his dear brother to miss his Examination For Discovery (which—it turns out—I would have missed too), but not to worry, for the matter had been smoothed over with opposing counsel (who had been a sometime drinking buddy back in their bar ad days) and the proceeding rescheduled for a date three weeks hence.  My head pounded with every syllable which issued from Randy’s bombastic mouth, and the sunlight reflecting from his polished desk compounded the pounding.

According to Randy, I would not believe how the police treated them.  The sheer brutality of it!  Not a case of a simple arrest.  Not a case of a straightforward take-down.  But complete and utter brutality.  Faces shoved into the pavement.  Knees dug into the back.  Zip-ties.  Punches to the temple.  Kicks to the groin.

“And truncheons,” chirped Michael.  “Don’t forget the truncheons.”

“Truncheons like you wouldn’t believe.”

I didn’t think it a good idea to mention that I had witnessed their takedown and hadn’t seen a single truncheon drawn.  Instead, I stared into Randy’s pristine face and, putting on my most innocent voice, asked:  “Why do you think they arrested you?”

Randy threw back a look of equal innocence and said:  “I’ve no idea.”

“The bastards!”

“I’ll say.  They broke my watch.”

“You should lodge a formal complaint,” I suggested.

“I don’t know about that.”

Michael, for his part, was insistent they never challenge authority.  “Cops investigating cops?  Would you call an undertaker to deliver a baby?”  I’m not sure about that last remark, but given his history of mental health issues, I was willing to give him some latitude.  His expression was severe enough and the quaver in his voice sufficiently tear-inducing that I understood what he meant:  he was afraid, and distrustful to the point of paranoia.

Randy was more pragmatic.  It was his connection to the police that had secured their speedy release and, more importantly, had killed the video of their arrest before it sloshed its way through the media sewer pipes.  It would not be in his interest to lodge a formal complaint when he had a good working relationship with those people.

“No conflict of interest?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“The Getz/Pendergast action.”

“There’s no conflict of interest.  Like I said:  a good working—”

“One of them beat up my boyfriend.”

# # # # #

I have a confession:  I don’t know how to end this.  I’ve never written a novel before, so I don’t know how this is supposed to happen.  An ending feels a bit like the bow that makes the finishing touch on a neatly wrapped present.  It makes the thing complete, a parcel until itself.  Following the logic of the present metaphor, it’s fair to suppose that once the present falls into the hands of the recipient, the bow will come undone and the paper will be shredded.  Neat packages are an illusion, a temporary state, as are endings.

When I started to write, I had no idea this would run to such a length.  All I wanted was to tell my story.  By the time the weekend was done, I had heard so many lies I felt sick.  The only antidote was to tell the truth.  The only truth I knew was the truth on the ground.  The truth of my experience.  The truth I encountered when I looked into the eyes of the men and women I confronted.

If I wrapped my story in a neat ending, it would feel like one more in a string of lies.  What would I do with the package?  Turn it into a commodity and hawk it online?  Maybe I could take my experience and tell everybody that its truth was my suffering.  I could parade my suffering around for fun and profit.  I could use my suffering to get a spot on Oprah and an endorsement for my book.  It would authenticate and syndicate me all at once.

How does it end?  Let me tell you how it doesn’t end.  It doesn’t end with an agent or a publisher (certainly not with a publishing house in which News Corporation or BMG has a stake).  It doesn’t end with a contract or a publicity junket.  It doesn’t even end with a hissy fit and a loud “I quit” in O’Toole’s office.  I’m incapable of anything so decisive or dramatic.  I may have arrived at the offices with my jaw set and my resolve steeled, but as with every other encounter in my life, I frittered away my will on sober second thoughts, then hated myself for being spineless.

Hmmm.

Although this doesn’t count as an ending, it’s worth mentioning; for now, it’s the best I can manage:

In the ironic politics of municipal licensing, nothing quite matches the fact that Pride Week followed immediately on the G20 Summit.  Where a few thousand people protesting the destruction of the planet and the impoverishment of billions drew the wrath of nineteen thousand police, a million people celebrating their LGBTQ identities drew not even a tenth that force, which I interpret as a comment on the difference between global and local politics.  I will leave that comment to sit locked in its cryptic state, adding only that sometimes local governments need to tell the rest of the world to go fuck itself.  That’s what I hope the rest of the world tells the G20.

During Pride Week, Johnny and I went to a couple parties and on Sunday we stood at Yonge and St. Mary’s, just down the road from my apartment, and cheered ourselves hoarse as the parade went by.  Johnny caught condoms from a float and I caught beads and we pasted rainbow tattoos on our cheeks and after a third of the parade had passed, we saw the sex trade workers.  We wouldn’t have known they were sex trade workers if it weren’t for the signs they carried, which I expect was half the point.  They demanded their rights.  They demanded their dignity.  They demanded respect for the important service they perform.

Some of the women wore jeans or cut-offs and T-shirts, one was in pleather and carried a riding crop, one was topless with tassels dangling from her nipples.  Mostly they looked like me.  Their expressions reminded me of how I felt most of the time:  a little bit timid, a little bit vulnerable, but determined to speak out nonetheless.  I wanted to step off the curb and march with them.  I wanted to ask if any of them had known Lizzy Nunziato.  I wanted to ask if any of them had been with her on the night she died.  It would be reassuring to know that when even the least of us disappears, we leave behind people who care.

___________

Click here for a synopsis, links to previous chapters, and a consolidated epub of the first 21 chapters.

Related posts:

1. Hogtown! Chap 17 – Eastern Avenue
2. Hogtown! Chap 20 – Jay
3. Hogtown! Chap 24 – Good Furniture

_____________

My Dear Fr Moynaghan,

Not being a particularly religious man, I don’t know how one goes about nominating a person for a sainthood.  For that reason, I ask in advance that you forgive me for what must seem to you a rather clumsy request.  Nevertheless, please know that my intentions are pure and I don’t write this letter with the least concern for myself.  So how does it work?  Is it like the Oscars?  Maybe that comparison is too crass.  The Nobel Peace Prize, then?  Are there nominations and then deliberations?  Does it begin with humble suggestions from ordinary parishioners like me?  Then is it passed up the chain of command, so to speak, from priest to bishop to cardinal to pope?  Administrative protocols elude me.  I never understand the mechanical details of how the world works.  And yet, there it goes, spinning on its axis, with or without my understanding.

Whatever it is that you people require to set in motion the wheels which ultimately deliver us to a pronouncement of sainthood, please accept this letter in satisfaction of that requirement.  If a nomination, then I so nominate.  If a suggestion, then take it from me.  If a prod, then this is my elbow in the papal gut.  We really need to get this woman done.

About the woman in question … Her name is Theresa, which itself is a matter of saintly precedent.  She is a neighbour of mine.  I see her every day when I walk home from the bus stop.  Often, I see her kneeling, or even prostrate (or is it prostate?  I get those words mixed up) on a stretch of lawn, in such an attitude of devotion, as if praying.  Immediately, I am struck by the expression of peace.  Or is it love?  Though, really, who ever sees one without noting the other lurking in the bushes nearby?  The other distinctive feature about her is that she rarely goes anywhere without a screwdriver in hand.  Maybe you guys could use the screwdriver as her special symbol, you know, the thing that always appears in portraits, of which I’m sure there will be plenty in St. Peter’s Basilica once the pope makes her a saint.  Or do you guys call female saints saintesses?  I’ve never been clear on that.

Anyhoo, the reason I mention the screwdriver is that she uses it to weed lawns.  She gets down on her knees, then burrows into the ground with her screwdriver, working the soil to loosen the roots of dandelions.  In our neighbourhood, those nasty little tubers spread like weeds.  Beginning in ’92, I would come home and find Theresa muddy-kneed on the lawn between a bird bath and a stone statue of the virgin, digging away at the noxious weeds and tossing them one by one into a recyclable yard waste bag.  We would often exchange greetings and then I would stand at the curb, gazing awestruck at the tiny patch of grass, a green island in a sea of gold.  There was her lawn, and beyond it, the neighbour’s, and so on, lot after lot for as far as the eye could see.  I would remark upon the seeming futility of the task.  An ordinary person would give up and pop open a beer.  But Theresa was not an ordinary person; she was blessed by a sense of holy purpose.  On more than one occasion, I pointed out to her that no one person could possibly weed all the dandelions in our neighbourhood, for—as you may appreciate—by the time she got even halfway down the first block, a fresh patch of gold would be popping up where she had begun.

Year after year, I saw her working faithfully to rout the evil weeds and to reveal the blessed green of the lawn they tried to hide.  To this day, she continues to weed, even though rheumatoid arthritis makes it difficult for her to kneel, especially if there’s rain in the weather forecast.

I remember asking her once:  “Theresa,” I said, “why do you work so hard at weeding the dandelions when it seems so futile?”

She answered me something like this, although I don’t remember the precise words:  “Well, Dave,” she said, “before I weeded dandelions, I did starfish.  I lived by the Bay of Fundy, and after every high tide, the stretch of beach where I lived was littered with the poor buggers, so I’d go out and toss a few back into the water.  Once, when I was hurling a big starfish, a blogger caught me in the act and asked why I bothered since it obviously made no difference.  I looked him straight in the eye and said:  ‘To this one, it makes a difference.’  And I threw the starfish into the water.  Well that impressed him and he blogged about it, and soon the story—or his version of it—went viral and everybody was telling the lovely story of the woman and her starfish.  The truth is:  if I left the damn things on the beach, the stench would turn something terrible, and then there was the noise of the gulls, loud enough to drive you loopy.  Not long after the story went viral, I sold the place by the sea and moved to the suburb of a landlocked city where I knew I’d never see a starfish again.  But damned if there weren’t these dandelions instead.”

Theresa paused and stared at her statue of the virgin mother.

“And?”

“And what?”

“And how does that explain why you feel compelled to weed acres of dandelions.”

My dear Fr Moynaghan, I must confess that, at first, I did not understand the woman’s answer.  Personally, I have always found it difficult to penetrate the mysticism of the deeply religious.  When she said that one is the same as the other, I didn’t understand.  “How could that be?” I asked.  “How could rescuing a vulnerable creature be the same as destroying a noxious weed?”

“No,” she answered, “they aren’t the same in that respect.  They’re the same in that they engage me in futile gestures and wasted efforts.”

Now I ask you, Fr Moynaghan, what could be more a sign of religious devotion than the practice of futile gestures and wasted efforts?  Surely there can be none so devout as our sister Theresa.  And so I humbly place her before you for your consideration as a saint.

Yours, etc.

_____________

My Dear Mr. Barker,

Thank you for your letter recounting the virtues of sister Theresa who, if I am to understand correctly, is not the member of any order and so not properly called “sister” except, perhaps, as a term of affection.  While the woman you write about does, indeed, sound remarkable, I must draw our exchange to a rather abrupt conclusion by pointing out the obvious technical detail that people cannot qualify for sainthood unless they are dead.

Your faithful servant in X, etc.

_____________

Dear Fr Moynaghan,

Pursuant to your suggestion, I have taken care of that detail.  Theresa’s screwdriver was helpful in this regard.  Not only will she be remembered for her good works, but also for her martyrdom.  Perhaps now you could expedite our cause in Rome?

Yours, etc.

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2. Story: Urine Love
3. The World’s Most Boring Story

Maureen had left her car parked in the alley behind Ralph’s, a Mini Cooper I could use to drive Jay back to the farm.  It made me laugh to watch Jay wedge himself into the passenger seat.  He drew his knees to his chin and said I couldn’t crash into anything since he would lose his legs if I did.  Johnny leaned over my window, pouting because I wouldn’t let him come for the ride.  I was self-conscious.  I was embarrassed.  I was afraid my parents would disapprove.  I was afraid my parents would fall into seizures when they saw Johnny’s tattoos.  I was afraid the neighbours would talk.  He went on with his accusations but none of them was true.  If I let him go home with me, I would use him as a mouthpiece; I would present his body to my parents and let it do my talking for me:  the Celtic runes, the Chinese dragons, the dark-rimmed glasses (now broken and taped in the middle), the purple bulbous nose and shining cheeks, the sideburns flaring at the jawline, the black jeans, the canvas shoes, the happy-face T-shirt with X’s for eyes.  That would be like asking my parents to listen to a lecture in Urdu.  Instead, I had to speak in my own right.

Robert Cavell, from my study group in first year, once told me a story about his youngest brother.  The family lived on the Ontario side of the Ottawa River, but their community was strongly Francophone.  In the home, the family spoke English, but outside, the children moved freely between cultures and often passed as Francophone.  As the children graduated from high school, each in turn went off to a nice English-speaking university in Ontario, all except Raymond who lived and studied in French at Laval.  After graduation, he found a job in Trois Rivières.  During elections, he voted for Gilles Duceppe.  He told his parents he wasn’t coming home.  This was how he chose to live because, for him, it felt right.  He was Quebecois trapped in an Anglais body.  Of course, it wasn’t enough to live like this; he had to go home to his parents and show them how, when he spoke, he did so in his own proper tongue.  That was how it felt for me this morning; I was going home to show my parents how I spoke in my own proper tongue.  I wouldn’t be able to accomplish this if I brought someone else along to do my speaking for me.

Johnny said fine but didn’t think we should put off the introductions.  Always better to square off against the things that make you feel most uncomfortable.

“Weren’t you listening?”

“Of course I was listening.  I just didn’t believe any of it.”

“You’ll get your chance.”

We kissed.  We sort of kissed.  We brushed cheeks.  We got close enough to say good-bye without provoking screams.

We drove first to my apartment, and while Jay was gathering up his things, I called work and told them I wouldn’t be in until tomorrow.

“Oh my God, I heard about that.”

The receptionist was a real gum-chewer, a real-nail-polisher, a real credit to her species.

“There were like three of you, right?  Oh my God!”

She dropped her voice to a whisper:  “That’s not even including Mr. O’Toole.  He had to spend two hours in a holding cell while they got things sorted out.  I’m not supposed to talk about this, but it’s okay cuz you’re one of us.”

I wasn’t looking forward to meeting with O’Toole–Randall, that is (I assumed I’d never meet with Michael since I’d helped him default on his Examinations on Discovery), and I worried, above all, that as we spoke, he would be able to tell from the look in my eyes that I knew the circumstances of his arrest, that I was somehow complicit in it, that I was, in a word, the rat.  He’d be able to tell from the twitch of my nose and the gnawing mincing sound of my front teeth that I was the one who brought the full weight of the law to bear on the gap between L3 and L4 as he lay on the ground with his cheek pressed into the pavement and called to his brother to stay calm and to co-operate and goddamn it can’t you guys take it easy I just picked this suit up from the cleaners.

All the way out, Jay nursed the lines cut into his wrists, and he opened and closed his fingers, trying to work the feeling back into his pinkies.  Jay rode with his window down, letting his hair flap across his eyes, while I kept my window up.  The cold had risen into my sinuses and I used half a box of no-name tissue on the drive home.  Jay wished I’d roll down my window too so we could have a good cross-breeze, but that would have put me in bed and I was not prepared to invalid myself on my parents’ farm.

This could have been a practicum in negotiation.  I was prepared to give up a lunch and two hours of visiting afterward.  Anything beyond 3:30 would oblige me to stay for supper and that was a line I was not prepared to cross.  How should I proceed?  The most important stratagem was to keep my fallback position hidden from Jay; he was already likely to give away too much on other fronts.  My starting position would be lunch only, and if Mom pressed me, as I knew she would, then after an appropriate amount of resistance, I would cave and agree to stay for a chat.

The entrance to the family farm is beautiful, nothing we designed on our own; it just happened that way, yet we enjoyed the admiring looks of people driving past on the concession road, throwing up clouds of dust that hung in the air and drifted over the poplar trees that lined the hundred metres of lane running down to the house.  I haven’t got an eye for the age of a house, but I’ve heard it was built during the 20′s or 30′s, a clapboard house painted white and with black shingles, not large, but grand for the veranda that wanders all the way around, screened in on the front half and open around the back where it faces the barn and the drive shed.  To one side, near the steps leading up to the front door, there’s an old maple still with a swing hanging from its lowest branch.  Even though the swing could have come down years ago, I expect my Mom has made Dad keep it there as an open question, one I’m nowhere near ready to answer.

We said nothing as we rattled down the lane, and we listened for a bit after I turned off the engine, but the air was still.  On the porch steps, I called for Mom.  On the veranda, a bowl of hulled strawberries, fresh picked from the garden, sat at the foot of a deck chair.  I called again for Mom and swooshed away a fly.  Jay swept past and into the house, saying there was time enough before lunch for him to get cleaned up, which was a surprising thing to hear him say.  Either he was growing up, or he was very very dirty.  Probably both.  Mom was coming down the stairs when he was starting up, so he never made it more than half way before the questions began.

Mom wore jeans–which surprised me–wide around wide hips and stout stumps to sheath her legs.  She let Jay give her a peck on the cheek, then she thudded down the stairs to stand before me, where we looked each other up and down but didn’t touch.  She gave me a look.  There was something of judgment in it.  It was not enough to signal the obvious fact that I looked a mess (yes, Mom, I could see that for myself in the countless antique mirrors); she had to give it another turn of the screw and make me feel it was my fault I looked this way.

I may have been reading too much into her look.

While Jay went upstairs and showered, I helped set the table, not the kitchen table but the dining room table with its dark oppressive wood and its strict chairs.  Dad was in the mud room, humming and washing the dirt from his hands.

“So the two of you were marching?”

Dad appeared on the threshold between the kitchen and the dining room.  He smiled but it was less a smile of delight than a confession of bewilderment.  He didn’t know what to make of the world, so he hid behind a smile.  A man could find worse strategies for coping with not coping.  He at least would touch me, setting his arms around my waist and giving me a light hug.  Dad wore jeans too, but they looked natural on him, scuffed with mud on the left knee and frayed around the cuffs.  He had rolled his shirt sleeves up past the elbows.  Dad looked older now.  Mom dealt with the lines–lines which might otherwise have crackled from the corners of her eyes–by putting on weight and pushing the skin out from the inside, much like a person might smooth the surface of a beach ball by blowing more air into it.  But Dad had no such defence against the creep of time.  His skin–especially on his hands and face–had turned leathery.  Deep lines had scored themselves into the cheeks.

Mom scolded Dad for his dirty jeans and told him to change them if he wanted to sit with us on the good furniture.

I hated the good furniture.  I hated the very idea of good furniture.  I wanted to smash the good furniture the way revolutionaries had smashed statues of the czar.  When we had finished laying out the plates and cutlery and glasses, I sat in my usual place with my back to the picture window that overlooked the lane to the road.  I could have helped in the kitchen, but I’d only be accused of getting in the way and of not doing things right.  Better I should sit in my place and wallow in guilt for failing to do my part.  It made no difference what I did; it would be the wrong thing.

As Mom brought a steaming roast to the table:  “So you took our Jay to protest marches?”

“We had a look–”

“Your father and I saw some awful things on the TV, people behaving like hooligans.”

Mom left for the kitchen and returned with a platter of vegetables–onions, potatoes, and carrots that had simmered all morning with the roast in a slow cooker.  We sat across from one another and waited for the men, first Dad, who appeared from the kitchen still struggling to thread his belt through the loops, then Jay, who appeared from the front hall, running a towel through his hair then tossing it on the deacon’s bench as he entered the room.  I’ve never thought of our family as overly religious, but Mom made us bow our heads while she mumbled some rote tripe she dredged from her childhood.  When she was finished:  “So tell us about your weekend.”

Jay looked at me, then back to Mom, and apologized for catching a bus without saying good-bye.  “I just thought you knew.”

Mom looked all hurt, like Jay had committed a singular act of betrayal, but Jay ignored her look, paying close attention to the food in front of him, and he ploughed past the hurt with the story of his arrival at the bus depot in Toronto:  how I hadn’t been home, how he’d gone to Allen Gardens and hung out with people he met there, how he hooked up with me sometime after midnight, how we had breakfast with Johnny–

“Johnny?  Who’s Johnny?”

“Johnny’s a friend.”

“How come we’ve never heard of him?”

“A recent friend.”  I smiled and sawed away at my meat.  I set a sliver on my tongue and withdrew the fork.

“What is that?”

I looked up, smiling, and saw that Mom had fixed her gaze on my chest.  “This?”  It was a stupid question and Mom rewarded it with a scowl.  “This is the outline for a rose.”  I pulled down the collar to exposed more of the flower.  Dad faded from the scene, pretending to be wholly absorbed in the challenge of eating his share of the roast.

“What have you done to yourself?”

I wouldn’t say that Mom was presenting me with histrionics and apoplexy; with her clenched jaw and hard eyes, she was too controlled for that.  But she did present me with an intensity that seemed out of proportion to my offence.  And in her eyes, it was an offence.  I had done something unnatural.  I was born with such beautiful skin but had tainted it.  I had…I had allowed my body to be violated.  Somehow, Mom intuited that Johnny had something to do with this.  He had influenced me.  I had done it to impress him.  To get him to like me.  I was insecure.  I was being self-destructive.

When Mom stopped, the room filled with a great silent bubble.  But the silence wasn’t the absence of Mom’s voice; it was more like the anti-Mom–the obverse of Mom’s noisy self, and therefore still a part of Mom’s speaking, and therefore still under her control.  We sat in its thrall, struggling to chew through this impossible roast and wishing for anything else–even McDonald’s hamburgers.  There were streaks of grey through Mom’s hair.  I had never noticed the grey before.  Maybe the grey had only now appeared as the consequence of a shock to Mom’s system.  Maybe she would stare into one of her mirrors, then look back at me in horror, as if I were a colour vampire who had sucked the brown from her head.

“Did you…”  She was choosing her words with care.  It was a case of vengeful tact.  “Did you have to expose yourself to someone when you had that done?”

“You mean to Johnny?”

“To Johnny?”

“Johnny is a tattoo artist.”

Again, Mom used the word “violation.”  But in her mind it was more than simply a matter of violation:  I had allowed it.  To my way of thinking, the words “allow” and “violation” couldn’t fit in the same sentence, but Mom seemed to think they were compatible.  I hadn’t been coerced, but I had been influenced.  I wasn’t responsible, but it was my fault.  Mom’s view of things was so confusing, I didn’t know how to account for it.

When we had finished eating, I tried to help clear the table and wash the dishes.  It was astonishing to me how easily I slipped into the old family patterns:  women’s work, while the men went outside to putter or tinker or whatever they called it.  I had sacrificed myself for Jay, using my rose to divert attention from him.  There might have been an interrogation that led to a confession.  Instead, talk about protests and police cruisers on fire and mass arrests and broken windows transmogrified into talk about how the body is a temple.  Hell.  The way Mom spoke, she probably thought I was a virgin–and that it mattered.

While the tea steeped in a bone china pot, I tried to find a way to address my mom as an equal.  I wanted to be open.  I wanted to be honest.  I wanted to speak as one adult to another.  We settled into the sitting room, with our shortbread and our strawberries, with our tea and our cream, all of it arranged on a pretentious wooden trolley that Mom had bought at auction when the Pentlands lost their farm.

I started in, awkwardly, haltingly.

Mom interrupted to note how thin I was, how wan my complexion.  “Are you feeling well?”

“Yes, Mom.  A little tired.  A bit of a cold.  But otherwise fine.”

I wanted her to listen.  Why wouldn’t she shut up and listen?

“Mom, I got arrested.”  It was a drastic move, but I saw no other way to get her attention.

It did get her to shut up–for about ten seconds.  Then she started in with the questions, and as I tried to answer those, the questions on the questions, and as I tried to answer those, the further questions on the questions until I felt overwhelmed and lost my way.  I tried to describe things for her.  I tried to turn the weekend into a mice linear orderly narrative.  But when I looked at my writing materials, I discovered that I had inscribed everything on a pane of glass which I had then dropped on the pavement.  Now, the statements I choked out for my mom felt like slivers of glass coming up my throat.

She glared at me as I told how we’d been rounded up like pigs, forced to the ground and hands zip-tied behind our backs, marched into cages with nowhere to pee except in view of everyone, strip-searched by men, and then, and then, and then.  Mom had been tapping a silver tea spoon against her good china cup when she lost her hold and it fell, clattering first against the saucer and then onto the bare wooden floor.  She stared at the teaspoon as if picking it up presented a puzzle of unfathomable complexity.  She gave me a furtive half-look.

“That’s not possible,” she said.

The scent of fresh strawberries had filled the room.  It was strangely at odds with the odour I remembered from the examination room when I had wiped myself down with my clothes and had put on an orange outfit.

“Things like that don’t happen here.”

I gazed out the window at the rows of beans.

“It’s not as if we live in a banana republic.”

___________

Click here for a synopsis, links to previous chapters, and a consolidated epub of the first 21 chapters.

Continue reading chapter 25, titled Toronto Pride.

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2. Hogtown! Chap 17 – Eastern Avenue
3. Hogtown! Chap 25 – Toronto Pride

__________

When Chuck fell in love with Camilla, it struck him at a visceral level.  Maybe visceral is the wrong word.  It suggests that Chuck felt his love in the gut whereas, when he examined his feelings, he discovered that he felt his love most keenly in the nose.  Or (since Camilla would never allow Chuck to speak so crassly):  Chuck’s feelings for Camilla stirred up olfactory associations.

From snippets Chuck had read, he assembled a vague theory of why this was the case.  It involved pheromones and the biochemistry of attraction.  It involved the fast absorption rates of the nasal membrane.  It also involved neuropsychiatry and the way our sense of smell is linked to our most primitive mind.  Chuck never shared his theory with Camilla.  Instead, when they were together, he would say, “You smell wonderful.”  When he breathed her in, he wanted to add:  “It makes me horny.”  He never said this, of course, because that would have been crude and Camilla was a genteel person; she deserved better.

Once, when they were out at a local pub, when Chuck nestled close to Camilla and filled his lungs, when Chuck confessed that it sent his mind spinning (like he had just snorted a drug), Camilla smiled and pulled a slender vial from her purse.  “This is my secret,” she said.  She set the vial on the table between their bottles of beer.  Chuck lowered his head until his chin sat in a puddle of condensation.  Eau de toilette.

“Très chic,” he said, using his most sophisticated accent.  He leaned in and kissed his love on the neck, then nibbled on her earlobe.

When the beer had worked its magic, Chuck excused himself and went to the men’s room.  It was in the basement at the end of a dank brick-walled corridor.  There were two urinals, a sink, and a stall with a broken door.  Chuck was glad he only had to pee.  He stepped to the urinal on the left and stared at an ad for prophylactics.  Chuck liked to think of his body as a machine.  While his machine did its work down there, he occupied his mind with more erudite concerns up here.  In this instance, he gave his mind a challenge.  He had to come up with five euphemisms for the word condom before the last drop dribbled from his bladder.  Rubber.  That’s a no-brainer.  Cock frock.  That makes two.  The dong sarong is three.

Chuck never made it to four.  As his whiz splashed on the urinal puck, it jarred loose some free-floating molecules that wafted into his nostrils where they quickly lodged themselves in his nasal cavity and travelled to the olfactory receptacle at the base of his brain, what neuroscientists describe as the limbic system.  He recognized that odour.  He poked his head into the hallway to be sure no one was coming, then returned to the urinal and got down onto his knees.  Sticking his nose as close to the puck as he dared, he inhaled the strange combination of his own urine and commercial disinfectants.  The similarity was uncanny.

Upstairs at their booth, Chuck smiled at his girlfriend as he slid in beside her.  He put his nose as close to her as he dared and inhaled.  It was unmistakable.  Camilla’s Eau de toilette was a distillation of bar urine and cleaning products.  To be sure, Chuck waited until Camilla excused herself, then took up the vial of Eau de toilette, unscrewed the cap, and waved it under his nose.  It was undeniable.

In situations like this, most men have the good sense to shut up and smile, but Chuck was not most men.  He thought of himself as a scientist.  He wasn’t actually a scientist, but he believed in the power of reason and in the importance of speaking the truth, even if speaking the truth put him in conflict with popular opinion.  So when Camilla returned from the bathroom, Chuck spoke the truth to her.  Chuck learned the hard way (he would call it empiricism) that women don’t always want to hear the truth, or at least not in a cold detached way that makes the truth sound like a chemistry lesson.  And so that evening at the local pub, after a mild altercation, Chuck and Camilla agreed to cool things for a while.  For Chuck, that meant he would send flowers and call her in a week.  For Camilla, that meant she never wanted to see him again.

When Chuck called after the first week, Camilla was evasive.  Being an optimist, Chuck interpreted her vague comments in a favourable way.  He had hoped that their relationship could be restored.  When Chuck called after the second week, Camilla was more direct.  However, as with most grieving, Chuck’s began in denial; he couldn’t believe Camilla never wanted to see him again.  It wasn’t possible.  Not after all the time they had spent together.  Not after the powerful connection they had established.  But by the third week, Chuck knew it was over.  Acceptance was a long way off, but the grieving had begun.

There were whole afternoons that Chuck couldn’t remember.  He passed them wandering through the city streets.  Sometimes he rented movies they had watched together, and sitting alone in front of his TV, he would cry himself to sleep.  There on the couch, he would fall to dreaming of Camilla.  Chuck was not a visual dreamer.  What he recalled most from his dreams were conversations and, most powerfully, scents.  He dreamed of moments when he had rested his head on Camilla’s shoulder and breathed in her lovely scent.  It reminded him of how he felt when he had first fallen in love with her.

Waking suddenly from one of his dreams, Chuck saw that it was only midnight.  He threw on a jacket and rushed to the local pub.  He took a place at the bar where he left his jacket draped over the back of a chair and ran downstairs to the bathroom.  Standing at one of the urinals, he sprayed a torrent over the puck.  Even before he was done, he could smell Camilla’s scent rising into his nostrils.  Without zipping up, he crouched before the urinal and pressed his nose against the plastic cover that held the puck in place.

When another patron burst into the bathroom, Chuck didn’t have time to rise to his feet, or even to turn his head.  The man saw Chuck kneeling with his face stuck in the urinal and assumed he was a pervert.  He hated perverts.  A couple years ago, a pervert had flashed his wife.  He gave Chuck a going over.  Not hard.  But hard enough to leave him dazed and sprawled in a puddle beneath the leaking sink.

Chuck spent the rest of the night in the emergency ward of the local hospital.  He had a broken rib and a chipped tooth.  A police officer questioned him about the assault, but the interview didn’t go well.  For one thing, every time he used the letter “s” he made a whistling sound because of the chipped tooth.  For another thing, the police officer wasn’t terribly sympathetic, especially after Chuck explained why the man had assaulted him.

“What the hell were you doing with your head stuck in a urinal?”

“I was smelling something.”  Whistle, whistle.  Smelling something.

It was late and they had given him Percocet for the pain in his gut.  As soon as the police officer left, Chuck lay back in the hospital bed and drifted away like a boat on a river.  No one ever really sleeps in an emergency ward.  Not with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and the triage nurses barking orders and the gurneys with their squeaky wheels.  Chuck dozed and woke, dozed and woke.

With eyes shut, the haunting scent visited him once again.  Chuck smiled.  “Camilla, you’ve come to see me.”  He reached to the figure beside his bed, then opening his eyes, saw that it was a squat man in hospital greens.

“I ain’t no Camilla,” the man said.  “I’m the janitor.”

The man had parked his trolley next to Chuck’s bed so he could go next door to clean the toilet.

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>> Harry presses his back to the post of the swing set and watches a light plane pass overhead.  The plane trails a banner ad for something.  Harry can’t say for what.  A chill wind makes his eyes tear and that blurs his vision.  Maybe it’s an ad for cough syrup, or condoms.  Most likely an ad for a wireless service provider.

Harry wouldn’t be in such a bind now if he hadn’t lost his smart phone this morning.  It dropped from his hand as he stepped onto the bus.  He stood on the top step and watched the smart phone clatter onto the pavement and slip through the grate on the catch basin.  The bus driver gave a sadistic chortle until Harry glared at him.  A plopping sound rose from the catch basin signaling that the smart phone was lost forever.

Helen’s words return to him now:  “These evils set upon us in threes.”  It calls to mind the image of wild dogs tearing apart a lost child.  The first evil—the lost smart phone—would not have happened if Harry had not taken the bus, and he would not have taken the bus but for the second evil—a dead car battery.  And the third evil?  Harry traces a fingertip through the compact sand beside the swing set post.  The third evil came long after Harry got off the bus.  He took a tumble down an embankment and into a thicket of barberry shrubs.  At first, he thought nothing of it; he stood and brushed himself off and continued to his appointment.  But as he walked first down one residential street, then down another, a throb took hold in his right thigh where a thorn had pierced the flesh.  Now a pain has seized the whole leg and Harry can barely stand.

Harry came here on a lead from head office.  In his mounting delirium, he gazes out from the playground to the rows of houses which front it.  What a godforsaken place.  And underinsured.  Harry had ventured into this suburban desolation to deliver at least one ignorant family into the safety of total insurance coverage—home, life, auto.  But after he turned the first corner and the main arterial road disappeared from view, the houses began to blur one into another. All the streets appeared the same.  Harry wished he had been more careful with his smart phone; it was GPS-equipped and he could have used it to get to his appointment.  Without his smart phone, he was lost in a maze of pro-forma, slap-dash, two-story fully-detached brick dwellings.

Harry thought it would be easy to stop a local resident and ask for directions, but he saw no one.  He walked for blocks without encountering a single person.  Twice, a garage door rose and a car zoomed onto the street, but it wasn’t until the car had passed that Harry thought to wave down the driver.  It would not have made a difference.  The drivers stared straight ahead, stony-faced and wearing sunglasses which made eye contact impossible.  On one occasion, Harry thought he saw an elderly woman staring down at him from a bedroom window, but when he blinked and looked again, the woman was gone.  He took the walkway to the front door and clacked on the brass knocker, but no one answered.  He pounded his fist on the door, but again, no one answered.

Along another road, Harry saw a garden hose between two houses.  As he drank, a black dog barked and lunged at the gate.  Maybe this was one of the three evils that had set upon him.  Further along the same road, Harry felt a need to relieve himself.  This is when he fell down the embankment and punctured the flesh of his thigh with a barberry thorn.

The light is low and soon it will be night.  A chill has taken hold of Harry and has set his bones to clattering.  The swing set is hardly adequate shelter, but there is nothing better.  Sodium lights flicker on and cast the whole landscape in an eerie orange, even Harry’s hands, which look other-worldly.  All the house lights use automatic timers and come on at roughly the same instant.  In his fever, Harry sees the houses springing to life, windows as eye sockets, glaring at him, judging him, finding him wanting.  Harry wishes he could be home with Helen.  There are so many things he wants to tell her.  If he had the chance, now, he would share his dreams with her; he would tell her how he had hoped one day to underwrite whole neighbourhoods just like this, to throw big company barbeques in parks just like this, to light fireworks on holidays and with sparkles in the shape of the company logo.  But now Harry worries that he will never have the chance to do these things.  He wishes he could have spent more quality time with Helen, maybe chat on Facebook with her or play games on Xbox.  Life could have been so much more for them.

There is a whirr in the distance, the chop of rotors hashing the air.  Maybe they will come and rescue him.  Maybe they’ll amputate his infected leg.  Maybe they’ll attach a robotic leg to the stump, a limb he can control with Bluetooth technology or Xbox Kinect.  The whirr fades and in its place there echoes across the land the plaintiff howl of a backyard dog.

They find Harry’s body the next morning.  The first to discover him is a seasonal worker for the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation.  The man operates a riding mower and is cutting the lawn when he spots a body propped against the swing set post.  He sees the body of a man, well-dressed except for a slit in the trousers, arm resting on a leather brief case.  A dog has torn away a chunk of the left cheek and is chewing it by the foot of the slide.

When the police arrive, they say it’s a shame the man didn’t have a proper smart phone.  How the hell can you expect to get anywhere these days without a GPS-enabled device?

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